Observations on politics, news, culture and humor

Tuesday’s links

It was an exceptionally busy day today and I’m tired, so you’ll have to make do with an extra-long list of links for the day. Full coverage returns tomorrow.

The Corner: xenophobe and immigrant-basher Mark Krikorian hyperventilates because J-1 visa-holding foreigners might be coming to the U.S. to earn summer paychecks and not learn through foreign exchange. Oh the humanity! I know a lot of Russian students who have come to the U.S. on J-1s to work over the summer. They might not be in classrooms learning English or blithely backpacking across the U.S., but that doesn’t mean they aren’t getting invaluable English practice, forming friendships with Americans and learning what it means to work here. It doesn’t even mean that they wouldn’t rather be sitting lazily in classrooms and learning about gerunds, just that getting a visa, flying over here and having a place to live is pretty expensive for a Russian college student. You know someone is a truly vile xenophobe when they’ve graduated from getting worked up over permanently-resident illegal aliens to legal, visa-holding temporary workers.

NYT: $59 billion more for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq passes the House by a 308-114 vote. Supposedly, the anti-war movement is supposed to see this as a victory because 102 Democrats voted no, as compared to 32 nays for a nearly-identical bill last year. Hey, but don’t worry–at least some of the Democrats who voted no this time did it because stimulus funds, including some earmarked for saving teachers’ jobs, had been stripped out of the bill. Not, you know, because American teenagers are getting blown up by roadside bombs as they make Afghanistan safe for dope-running by Ahmed Wali Karzai whilst we wipe out innocent people with drones and bombs. Heaven forbid you oppose war funding for those reasons…we mustn’t be too extreme!

NYT: in a rare bit of good news, the oil on the surface of the Gulf is is dissolving quickly. What remains to be seen is what sort of damage the oil will have done to swamps and marshlands, what it did to the ecosystem at depths and whether or not there is still a sub-surface plume issue. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for the best, most of all for the Gulf Coast fishermen and unique regional communities like the Cajuns who might be on the verge of losing a generations-long occupation.

NYT: the African Union decides to send more peacekeepers to Somalia. Outside of the sham, Western-backed Lesser Mogadishu Municipal Authority transitional government, I don’t know who this move benefits. The article also reminds us that the U.S. has already whizzed away $200 million of aid money in Somalia, with at least some of it going to help the transitional government employ child soldiers. Meanwhile, how about a solution that actually makes sense: “But many analysts argue that it would be better, in the long run, to pull out all the peacekeepers, let the transitional government fall, let the Shabab take over the country, and then allow clan militias and businessmen to rise up and overthrow them. The eventual result, analysts argue, would be a government that would be more organic and therefore more durable than a government that relies on outside forces to survive.”

Western Standard: uses this Toronto Star article on ridiculous hold-ups to two “free trade” agreements Canada is negotiating to make the point that “free trade” agreements like NAFTA don’t really establish free trade at all. But the case the Standard blogger makes is especially interesting–19th century free trade was fundamentally different because government was still small and fed primarily by tariff revenues, whilst 21st century government is massive and funded primarily by income and sales tax revenues. Thus, tariff barriers can be lowered with little damage, so long as quotas and other restrictions are maintained.